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Monday, October 10, 2016

ECB Allowed Deutsche Bank To Cheat In Latest Stress Test, FT Reports

In the latest scandal to emerge involving Deutsche Bank, earlier today the FT reported that German's largest lender was allowed to cheat, pardon was given "special treatment" by the ECB in the July stress tests. As part of the July stress tests results, which "promised to restore faith in Europe’s banks by assessing all of their finances in the same way" Deutsche Bank’s result was boosted by a "special concession" agreed to by Mario Draghi: DB's results included the $4 billion in proceeds from selling its stake in Chinese lender Hua Xia even though the deal had not been done by the end of 2015, the official cut-off point for transactions to be included.

While the Hua Xia sale was agreed in December 2015, it has still not been completed and now faces a delay after missing a regulatory deadline last month, though the bank is still confident of completion this year.

As the FT notes, the Hua Xia treatment was disclosed in a footnote to Deutsche’s stress test results, and adds that "none of the other 50 banks in the stress tests had similar footnotes, even though several also had deals agreed but not completed at the end of 2015."

As disclosed in the central bank's summer stress test, Deutsche’s common equity tier one capital fell to 7.8% after it was "subjected to the stress tests’ imagined doomsday scenario of fines, low interest rates and low economic growth." However, without the Hua Xia boost, the ratio would have been 7.4%, a level comfortably above regulatory minimums. Why the speal treatment? Because the higher published result helped reassure investors who were growing increasingly nervy about the bank’s capital adequacy.

Other banks were not as lucky:

In one case, Spanish lender Caixabank completed the €2.65bn sale of foreign assets to its parent company Criteria Holding in March but was still not allowed to include the impact of that sale in its results.